We Should Worry About How China Uses Apps Like TikTok

We Should Worry About How China Uses Apps Like TikTok
Illiberal innovations created for China’s vast surveilled and censored domestic market are increasingly popular overseas.

By Nick Frisch

Graphics by Ash Ngu

In 2009, after internet-fueled race riots between Uighur Muslims and Han Chinese in China’s northwest territory of Xinjiang, the ruling Communist Party took drastic action: the digital kill switch. Beijing disabled Xinjiang’s internet, sending military police to restore order. The blackout lasted nearly a year. Now, a decade later, Xinjiang is writhing under a new clampdown aimed at the Uighurs. This time, Beijing has embraced the opposite philosophy: a digital panopticon, enlisting private tech firms to expand China’s internet of things and enmesh its own people.

Until recently, China was dismissed as an innovation laggard that copied technology from the West. Today, many Chinese tech sectors have leapfrogged Silicon Valley, sometimes with heavy-handed help from the party. Consumer-friendly smartphone apps have pushed cash, credit cards and identification documents toward extinction. Hotel booking systems will ping your smartphone, linked to your national ID card, to let you check in using facial recognition. In under a minute, a mom-and-pop hardware kiosk can create a personalized QR code forcashless payments through WeChat, an indispensable app that combines the functions of WhatsApp, Venmo, Seamless, Uber and more. For an expatriate accustomed to China’s freewheeling start-up scene and whizzy tech conveniences, coming home can feel like stepping back in time.

But, as the Uighur minority of Xinjiang are learning, that convenience comes at an Orwellian price. Speedy data networks and integrated digital commerce are learning to work with the party’s aggressive security apparatus. Invasive DNA databases and facial recognition powered by artificial intelligence have created a digital dragnet, enhanced by mandatory surveillance apps installed on smartphones and backed by a newly built network of IRL gulags. Offenses as trivial as forwarding a traditional Islamic holiday greeting on WeChat, or posting a bearded selfie, can land citizens in internment camps. Even Uighurs living abroad are entangled, through their families and their smartphones, in Beijing’s crackdown. (The repression has reportedly created a black market in old Nokia phones, which are less legible to the state.)

Xinjiang’s plight is more than a local tragedy: It is a warning.

An ethnic Uighur woman walks in front of a giant screen with a picture of Chinese President Xi Jinping in the main city square in Kashgar in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China. The screen broadcasts a slideshow of images of Xi on loop, including propaganda images of his previous visit to Xinjiang.Thomas Peter for Reuters

The global risk from China’s technology sector is not necessarily a sinister conspiracy to exert Xinjiang-style controls overseas. Beijing’s leaders are focused on domestic affairs and for now, China’s budding tech dystopia is still more “Brazil” than “Black Mirror.” Rather, this risk is a byproduct of Beijing’s business as usual, on a huge global scale.

Products created for China’s vast surveilled and censoreddomestic market are increasingly popular overseas, where they are often cheaper and more appealing to consumers. Huawei, for instance, has honed its 5G wireless technology — which will support the next generation of data-intensive, A.I.-powered gadgets — in China’s domestic, bleeding-edge consumer market for the internet of things. Many Huawei phones are bought by Chinese who have never owned a PC or other digital device, giving the company an edge in imagining and designing mobile products for developing markets that skipped over the PC era. Huawei’s cheaper (and often subsidized) price points, and comparable or superior products, have made its phones a better-value purchase than the iPhone for cost-savvy consumers around the world, and its 5G infrastructure attractive for penny-pinching governments. Most are unaware, or apparently unconcerned, about censorship or surveillance.

They should be worried. According to the Soviet-style playbook that still influences Chinese security services, collecting haystacks of citizen information, by whatever means necessary, is the foundation of social control and “stability maintenance.”

The Soviet model was an analog blend of Big Brother and big data, amassing reams of information about citizens to understand their fears, vulnerabilities and intentions, and pre-empt any challenge to the Party-State’s power. China has adapted this paranoid style to the modern tech age. Private corporations and the Communist Party’s security apparatus have grown together, discovering how the samedata sets can both cater to consumers and help commissars calibrate repression.

The party’s instinctual contempt for privacy, married to its proactive industrial policy, can be a boon for well-connected private businesses. Many tech firms make a point of hiring the relatives of high party officials, and a vast state database of headshots might be shared with a private firm to train new facial recognition software, while the firm’s trove of real-time user data might be offered to police, for a panoramic view of potential “troublemakers.”

Between the Communist Party’s repressive impulses, its influence over China’s vast and innovative tech ecosystem, and new technology’s general propensity to disrupt and surprise, it is naïve to expect that we can fully anticipate and mitigate the impact of illiberal innovations exported abroad. Even innocuous-seeming technology, when paired with China’s authoritarian impulses and state-led development model, may challenge liberal values in unexpected ways.

Consider TikTok, a social video-sharing app that last year had more downloads on the Apple app store than Instagram. TikTok fills a market niche abandoned by Vine, the American-grown short-video-sharing app shuttered by Twitter in 2017. Users can upload videos of themselves or friends lip-synching the latest pop tunes or decorating or distorting their faces, all easily edited into a clip for other users to “like,” “share” or comment on.

To China’s surveillance state, a video-sharing app offers much more than than your dog dancing to Drake. TikTok’s domestic Chinese version, Douyin, is heavily censored and surveilled: Last year, the British cartoon Peppa Pig was purged from the platform after the authorities decided she had taken on subversive meaning. (It is unclear whether this was because of a direct government order or the company pre-emptively censoring itself.)

For residents of Xinjiang, posting a video of traditional Uighur music sung in their native language might be flagged by machine-learning algorithms, and bring a deletion and a visit from the police. In what appear to be precautionary performances of loyalty to the government, Uighur users of Douyin have recorded themselves singing pro-party songs, pointedly in Mandarin. Given the wide use of facial recognition across Xinjiang, and the potential sharing of security data sets between state agencies and private firms, Douyin’s raw video data may also offer a tempting training set for machine-learning software. (Recent leaks have shown China’s developing capability to match GPS coordinates with Uighur facial recognition data; with help from a Yale professor and an American biotech firm, Thermo Fisher, China has also built a database of Uighur DNA.)

A video posted on Douyin of Uighur workers in Hotan singing “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” The video, shared across Twitter and Facebook by the Uighur diaspora, was deleted from media platforms within China.

A Douyin video, reportedly taken in Xinjiang, appears to show a Uighur child singing “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” The user's Douyin ID and children's faces have been obscured to protect their identity.

To date, no evidence suggests that Chinese authorities have used their leverage over Douyin domestically to censor or surveil TikTok overseas. But given what we know about Beijing’s illiberal impulses, there is a gap between what is provable beforehand, and what it is prudent to presume. The brazen lying that is normalized in China’s corporate and political culture, and the meaninglessness of written rules, mean that published regulations, or guarantees by private firms and government officials, are simply not credible. (Just ask Prof. Kenneth Kidd, the geneticist at Yale who accepted assurances from his Chinese counterparts that DNA samples for their joint project would be ethically obtained. Dr. Kidd claimed to be shocked — shocked — to discover that the Ministry of Public Security’s sweet nothings can’t be taken at face value. His credulous negligence has tainted a Yale DNA database; future generations may remember Thermo Fischer among corporate collaborationists like I.B.M. and Bayer.)

TikTok itself has already been fined by the Federal Trade Commission for a casual attitude toward privacy compliance; its heavy-handed solution, mass deletions, enraged some consumers. But the choices of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, are rational; it fears the Communist Party more than angry tweets from tweens outside the Great Firewall.

The West’s increasing technological and economic exposure to China may have unintended consequences. Over a decade ago, the singer Björk was banned from China, and muzzled within the Great Firewall, for advocating Tibetan independence during a concert in Shanghai. If, tomorrow, Björk followed up with a TikTok video pleading for Uighur rights, and the clip went viral globally, would the party be able to resist the temptation to lean on ByteDance to slow or stop it? If your face appears in the background of another person’s TikTok video shot in Berlin, will it be logged using facial recognition software running in Shanghai? Those who complain that American firms like Facebook are invasive and unaccountable are unlikely to prefer China’s tech giants, which are often cowed by, and collaborating with, the Party-State’s opaque and irascible censorship and surveillance apparatus.

To be sure, the United States has abused its own technological hegemony for power and profit. After World War II, much global communications infrastructure ran through wires on United States soil, giving American spies privileged access to the world’s communications. American intelligence agencies have been credibly accused of seeding United States-made electronic exports with bugs and spyware.

American Apps Dominate in the Five Eyes Countries

Each flag represents the country of origin of a top ten downloaded app within a national market. TikTok was the only Chinese app to become popular last year within the countries of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

TikTok

Source: Monthly data from App Annie

The critical difference with China lies not in the wiring of chips or lines of code, but in history, culture and scale. By custom, Americans trust that the contents of their snail-mail letters are protected by the Fourth Amendment; government access requires a judge to issue a warrant. American tech firms routinely stand up to the United States government. Apple, for example, has developed default iOS encryptions that shield user activity from the company itself, to the frustration of the F.B.I. An iPhone user in Iran or Belarus benefits from Silicon Valley’s civil libertarianism.

China is different. The People’s Republic has always reserved the right to open its citizens’ mail at any time, for any reason; there is no basis to believe its basic approach will differ because the technology is new. Ironically, the internet, which Western techno-utopians prophesied would liberalize China, may instead allow the party to indulge previously impossible fantasies of mass control. The Uighurs of Xinjiang are the first in human history to fully experience the downside of China’s illiberal innovation. They are unlikely to be the last.

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Correction: May 2, 2019 A previous version of this article misstated the location of Xinjiang, a province of China. It is in the northwest of the country, not the northeast.

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